


Funny How Things Work Out

by Three Guesses (Thr3eGuess3s)



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Angst, Children, F/F, Kara is a useless bi, Lena is a pining lesbian, Mon-El is an utter knob, Romance, Slow Burn, Well this happened didn't it, Woops, how do you even tag things?, i guess, of course, pls just read my terrible work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-04
Updated: 2018-09-04
Packaged: 2019-07-07 00:57:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15897636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thr3eGuess3s/pseuds/Three%20Guesses
Summary: Kara and Lena meet at university, this is their lives from that point on. Nothing goes to plan and everything's a mess, there are too many ups and downs to count, but maybe it all works out okay in the end...





	Funny How Things Work Out

**Author's Note:**

> Ha ha ha, I wrote this in two sittings. Hope to god it's coherent, enjoy!

They met in university, as a lot of people do, purely by chance at a mutual friend’s party. Lena had never been one for hardcore clubbing, hating how random guys would paw at her and how she’d usually be forced to flee the dancefloor to escape them, but she would always quite happily get completely shitfaced in the kitchen of the uni accommodation beforehand. Happy to wave everyone out the door and then stumble into bed.

 

This time, she’d been dragged out by her flatmates to somewhere on the opposite end of campus, journey juice in hand and a spare half-bottle of vodka in her bag. She stuck out from the group like a sore thumb, all the other girls she was with being dressed in skimpy clothes that were perfect for clubbing, where Lena was still in the flannel and jeans she’d been wearing all day, but she didn’t care. They’d had pre-pre-drinks in the kitchen beforehand, and she was already feeling a pleasant buzz from the alcohol as it coursed through her veins and warmed her from the inside out.

 

The place she’d been pulled to wasn’t as nice as her own accommodation - the kitchen was small and cramped and they had to stand on the table to cover the light sensor when the tinfoil fell off it because there wasn’t a light switch - but it was clean, at least, unlike at the last flat-party she’d been to. The people were nice as well, and incredibly welcoming to her and her flat, even despite never having met them before. They, too, were dressed for the club, and some of the girls were still popping in and out to put the finishing touches on their makeup.

 

Lena was given a glass, instructions not to break it, and a pink plastic straw. Someone donated some of their summer fruits squash to her, and someone else poured her some lemonade to go with her vodka. At some point, drinking games were suggested and attempted, but everyone soon lost interest, favouring socialising instead, and that was how Lena found herself talking to the only other person in the room who wasn’t planning on going to the clubs.

 

Kara was a gorgeous ball of sunshine who hadn’t had a drop of the hard stuff to drink all evening. She was giggly and clumsy, but Lena was drunk, so she was even more so. They spent most of the rest of the evening together, talking and getting to know one another, and they soon discovered they had a fair few things in common. If asked now, Lena couldn’t tell you the specifics of the conversation, so lost she’d been in Kara’s eyes and Kara’s smile. She’d thought many a time how beautiful the other girl was, but she’d been very careful not to let the words pass her lips; coming onto someone when you couldn’t be trusted to walk in a straight line was never the best plan, and Lena couldn’t even  _ see  _ in a straight line at this point.

 

When eleven o’clock had rolled around and the pre-leaving panic had begun, Lena had gathered her belongings like the rest of them and joined the herd of drunk uni girls as they made their way into the night. Kara had walked them all to the door with pleas for them all to stay safe and to call her if they were in trouble, and Lena thought that was sweet.

 

And she told her as such.

 

And then she fell over.

 

And then Kara, sweet, sweet Kara, had helped her up - which took some doing; Lena was spectacularly smashed - and told her that she definitely shouldn’t be walking home alone. Lena had, of course, protested, stating that they were on campus, and that it was only ten minutes, and that she’d walked further in worse states before, but Kara was stubborn. 

 

And that was how Lena found herself walking back to her flat, hanging off a surprisingly muscular arm that was attached to one of the prettiest girls she’d ever seen in her life. She insisted she was fine for most of the way home, even when she fell off the kerb and had to be pulled up off the road, and even when she smacked into a tree and then hit the ground again, but she gave up when she tripped over her own feet and very nearly pulled the blonde girl down with her.

 

She texted Kara a thank you the next morning, the girl having plugged her number into Lena’s mobile with strict instructions to call her if she needed help before fetching her a glass of water and helping her take her shoes off.

 

And then, of course, she’d thrown up.

 

She’d been sick the night before as well, but thankfully Kara had been gone by then. Images from the night before swirled about Lena’s head as she lay curled on the floor of her ensuite, cheek pressed against the cool exterior of the toilet bowl, and she was surprised to find she remembered almost everything. She didn’t remember getting changed out of her jeans, but the fact that they’d been left in the middle of the floor told her that she’d probably managed that herself, and she didn’t really remember actually getting back into the flat, but here she was.

 

What she  _ did  _ remember, though, was Kara’s face, the way she’d smiled, and how nice she’d been. At least, she thought she remembered. She might be wrong, though; surely no one was that pretty, or that nice to a girls they’d only just met.

 

The next week, though, Lena found out that yes, Kara really  _ was  _ a walking goddess, and that, yes, she really was that nice. She waltzed into Lena’s kitchen, her flat playing host this time, and stole the Luthor’s breath. She was also, this time, dressed for going out, something that Lena was not, but swiftly became when she found Kara was planning on clubbing. She knew it was a bit odd, deciding to do one of the things you sort-of hate just because a girl that you’re starting to think you have a crush on is going, but Lena had put peach schnapps in her apple juice when she’d eaten her dinner at 6:30 and had been drinking since then, so it seemed like a great idea.

 

She emerged from her room wearing black skinny jeans, a blouse that was almost see-through, it was so thin, and a blazer. She’d considered putting more makeup on, but she’d fumbled and dropped the mascara when she tried to open it, so decided against it.

 

She walked into the kitchen to cheers, her flatmates being delighted that she was finally coming clubbing with them again, but she had eyes only for Kara, who grinned brightly at her and complemented her outfit. Someone else across the table commented that Lena looked sufficiently gay enough that most guys would probably not try anything with her, and Lena had said good. Kara looked mildly surprised by this, but didn’t seem to mind, and had soon initiated a game of ring of fire.

 

Kara was actually drinking tonight, which meant that Lena tried to make Kara drink as often as possible. In her mind, if Kara got shitfaced, then that made them even.

 

But Kara both knew her limits and was sensible, grabbing a glass of water after Lena had made her down her drink for answering a question. Lena, however, was not so sensible, and by the time they were heading out the door she was stumbling.

 

So was everyone else though, and Lena wasn’t the one that threw up at the bus stop so she considered it a win. Besides, this was the drunkest she was going to get, drinks at the club being stupidly expensive and Lena not wanting to pay that much for something she was just going to end up spilling everywhere anyway.

 

The moment they entered the club was the moment Lena remembered why she didn’t like it; the music was both terrible and loud and the room hot and stuffy. She was pulled onto the dancefloor by one of her flatmates and she grabbed Kara by the hand and dragged her with her. And it was there they danced for a while, Lena getting more and more into it the more time passed. She was just beginning to relax fully into it, a song she actually knew blaring over the speakers, when she noticed the discomfort on Kara’s face.

 

She wasted no time in pulling the other girl to the edge of the dancefloor, and then to a vacant booth, and then to the beer garden at the back of the club. Once in the fresh air, Kara visibly relaxed.

 

“I’m sorry,” she’d said to Lena. “I just… all the lights, all the music. It’s too much for me sometimes.”

 

And Lena had shrugged and said “I don’t like it much either,” and the two of them spent the rest of the night sitting outside in the cool night air, chatting over the muffled sound of the music. They popped back in on occasion, but never for long, and they left before everyone else, walking back to the campus at three in the morning.

 

Lena had texted Kara the next morning to make sure the other girl was okay, and that was the beginning of their friendship.

 

~~~~~

 

The rest of first year found them messaging regularly and hanging out with one another outside of flat-parties and alcohol related activities. Of course, Lena  _ did _ pull Kara out for a pleasant afternoon of day-drinking once or twice, but that was only ever for a special occasion, and they really spent most of their time in museums, art galleries, and each others’ bedrooms, spending hours just sitting and talking and watching cat videos on the internet.

 

Lena learnt that Kara had a dog called Krypto and a sister called Alex, and then she learnt that Alex could drink her under the table with no problem at all when she came down to visit Kara. She learnt that Kara was adopted, and learnt why that was one night when Kara had had too much to drink and spent what felt like an age crying into her shoulder, and she promised herself then that she’d do everything she could to protect this girl from hurting any more than she already was.

 

And Lena told Kara things, too; she told her that she was adopted as well, and that her family weren’t exactly the best, and that her brother had done some really terrible things but that, deep down, she still loved him. She told Kara that she wondered sometimes if that made her a monster, and she told her that she worries the same madness lays dormant within her, waiting patiently beneath the surface for the right time to devour her.

 

They learnt all there was to know about each other, and soon became almost inseparable, making loose plans to see each other over the summer sometime when they all broke up for the holidays. They could be found together almost every day, whether it was just the two of them, or a group, and more than one person asked if they were dating.

 

Both girls had laughed at that, of course, because they weren’t and, as far as Lena knew, never would be. Kara had admitted to Lena that she was some shade of bi, but that she leaned more towards men, and Lena, despite being practically in love with Kara by this point, had realised then that she had no chance. She’d long come to accept that she liked the other girl, and was now just waiting for the feeling to pass, but still, every time someone asked about the nature of her and Kara’s relationship, there was a pang of longing within her.

 

Even Kara’s parents wondered; they never said anything outright, but she could tell by the way they looked at her when she came to stay for a week over the summer that they were thinking it. Alex openly teased them about it, playfully ribbing them and talking about how amazing their wedding would be and how cute their kids would be, and Kara had thrown a pillow or cushion at her each and every time.

 

There was one particularly memorable moment when Kara had yelled ‘Oi, you’re the gay one!’ as she threw a pug cushion at her sister, which was then followed by the blonde getting an idea and spending the new two days subtly-not-subtly trying to get her lesbian sister to date her lesbian friend. Needless to say, Alex and Lena did  _ not  _ hook up with one another, and Kara went to the freezer one evening to find all her ice-cream had been eaten in retaliation.

 

~~~~~

 

When second year rolled around, Kara and Lena went back to hanging out together regularly, although they weren’t living together. Housing arrangements had been made and finalized in December and the two had met in January, so they’d ended up living with their respective flats. Kara was in a house of a mix of boys and girls, where Lena was living with three other girls.

 

Second year passed much like the first, and third just like the second. They both still lived with their flats, but both girls ended up keeping almost half of their belongings at one another's’ houses. There came a point where they were sharing wardrobes, Lena bundling herself in one of Kara’s many jumpers when the weather was cold, and Kara diving into Lena’s collection of elegant blouses when she needed to look particularly stunning.

 

They’d even taken to eating dinner together every night and going to sleep in whoever’s house they happened to be in. Every night they shared a bed was some small form of torture for Lena, but she was just thankful she had the blonde as a friend at this point. She’d wake up to Kara’s arms around her and just revel in the moment, which she knew she probably shouldn’t do, but she just couldn’t help doing anyway.

 

The jokes and questions about them being a couple had long died off, in part because everyone knew they’d never get together, and in part because they knew that pointing out as such to Lena as often as they had been was paining the girl. 

 

Over the years, Kara went on many dates whilst Lena went on none, and people had started to notice. It was obvious to everyone but Kara that Lena was in love with her, and several people had said as such. One of those people had even been one of Kara’s childhood friends, Winn, who had been just as smitten with Kara as Lena was, and the two had spent an evening drinking together and poking fun at themselves for being hopelessly in love with a girl they never had a chance with.

 

Still, Lena couldn’t bring herself to do what Winn had managed and move on. She’d wanted to date other people, but whenever she’d kissed someone in a club or stumbled back to some random girl’s apartment, she’d only been able to think of Kara, and it made her feel guilty. So Lena stayed single, and she watched as Kara gave her heart to boys she knew didn’t deserve it, and then helped her put the pieces back together when they inevitably broke it. She spent hours helping Kara pick out outfits for dates she knew would end badly, but supported her through it all anyway.

 

She’d support Kara to the ends of the earth, be there for her no matter what, and she knows Kara would do the same for her.

 

Which is why she says yes to moving in with Kara after they graduate.

 

She knows it might be a dumb idea, to torture herself by being so close to the object of her affections but unable to do anything, but she’s already been doing this for two years by now, so what’s a few more? And that’s how they end up renting a loft apartment in a city where Kara gets a job in a media company and Lena starts working in the labs of her father’s business.

 

Neither of them have long hours, but somehow both of them end up staying late a lot anyway. When they realise this about each other, though, they begin to keep more reasonable schedules for, as much as they’re fine with neglecting themselves to some degree, neither wants to see the other overworked, so they pop by and surprise each other during the day. Kara always brings lunch for Lena, and Lena always picks Kara up on her way home so the blonde doesn’t end up organising meetings and events all night.

 

And it’s nice.

 

It’s not all that Lena ever wanted, but it’s close enough and she’ll take what she can get. Kara is still oblivious, but Lena’s gotten better at hiding her obvious pining, and she’s even managed to convince most people that she’s over her feelings now.

 

The convincing becomes even easier when Kara meets Mike.

 

The two meet at work and Kara spends the whole car journey back complaining about how annoying the man is, but then rounds it all off by saying he’s handsome and sweet, which leaves Lena sitting, confused, in the parked car, hands on the wheel and wondering why the soft tone Kara’s voice had taken on there filled her with dread.

 

Of course, she brushes the feeling off and goes about her life, but it comes back in full force when she actually meets Mike; he and Kara have been talking for a while and have even been on a coupe of dates, and now Kara’s dragged them both out so her almost-boyfriend can meet her sort-of-girlfriend. 

 

It goes well enough, Kara being excited about them seeming to like each other, but Lena sees Mike’s eyes roaming her body, sees how he’s giving Kara more alcohol than she can handle, and she hates him. She hates the way he squeezes Kara’s ass when he goes to the bar for more drinks, and hates the way she can see him flirting with pretty girls whilst Kara, the girl he’s actually  _ dating _ is gushing over him to a surprisingly-sober Lena.

 

At then end of the night, Mike tries to take Kara home, insisting to Lena that he’ll get her back to her flat safe and sound and not listening to any of the Luthor’s protests. Lena sees right through him, knows his intentions for her best friend, and keeps his hands off Kara as best as she is able. He asks the blonde if she wants him to walk her home, but Kara is in no state to make any decisions that don’t involve falling into bed and sleeping all day the next morning, and it’s only when Lena yells ‘I live with her, you tit!’ that he actually backs off.

 

The next day, Kara is spectacularly hungover and remembers nothing of the night before past the third shot Mike bought her. It’s the first time this has ever happened to her, and it scares her a bit, Lena can tell, but she tries her best to assure Kara that she didn’t do anything stupid and that she won’t let it happen to her again, if that’s what she wants. Kara smiles and thanks her and tells her that, yes, she has no desire to repeat the experience, so it would be greatly appreciated if Lena could cut her off next time please.

 

But Lena’s not there the next time.

 

It’s the weekend after meeting Mike, and Kara’s gone on another date with him. It’s two in the morning when Lena gets a call from her best friend, and Kara is totally incoherent and seems to be mostly taking to someone else, but Lena pulls herself out of bed when the blonde hangs up and drives over to the bar where Kara had told her she was meeting her now-boyfriend. 

 

She’s just in time, and she bundles Kara into the front seat and gives her a bottle of ice-cold water she’d been keeping in the fridge for her, and she even begrudgingly gives Mike a lift back to his place on Kara’s insistence. The man is rather drunk, more so than last week, and Lena is  _ very  _ glad that she got there when she did, else Kara would be on her way home with this creep. He’s sat behind the blonde, and keeps sneaking his hands around the seat to try to grab her, and the sight makes Lena sick to her stomach, and she tells Kara as much the next morning.

 

But Kara defends him, saying he was drunk and that he’s not like that when he’s sober, but Lena doesn’t believe that for a moment.

 

They date for a year before Kara moves in with Mike, leaving Lena in an empty flat, which she soon leaves for a penthouse apartment that she buys outright because why the hell not? She can afford it now that she’s worked her way up her father’s business and been given access to the full scope of her family’s wealth. 

 

She feels empty without Kara, though. They still see each other, of course, but it’s less frequently now, and often tainted by the presence of Mike, who’s eyes still run hungrilly over Lena’s body and whose hands have sometimes started to do the same. It’s only ever when she’s drunk, so he can pass it off as him helping her stay on her feet, but she knows that’s not what it is. She makes a fuss literally every time he does it, so Kara knows what’s going on and so Mike is forced to explain himself to her, and Kara always tells him off, but then always forgives him anyway.

 

Lena doesn’t forgive him, though, especially when Kara turns up at her apartment two months after she’s moved out with tears in her eyes and a look of desperation on her face. She’s pulled inside the moment Lena opens the door and sees her, and then it’s just like university again, Kara sobbing onto the brunette’s shoulder as Lena strokes her hair and wishes she could solve all her problems.

 

Kara eats all of Lena’ emergency ice-cream and spends the night. The two share a bed again, and they both wake up happier than they feel they’ve been in a long while, but they don’t admit this to one another. A day later, Mike is at Lena’s apartment and apologising, and Kara is going home with him, giving Lena one last hug of thanks before she’s out the door and gone into the night.

 

~~~~~

 

She doesn’t know if it was planned or not, but Kara’s pregnant, and Mike is an odd mixture of smug and happy. She’s known for a while that Mike had been pushing for a child, had been incredibly insistent about it; Kara had told her as much on one of their few evenings alone, but the blonde didn’t think she herself was ready.

 

“I don’t know,” she’d said to Lena. “It’s like… I know I want kids, but just not now? I’ve got a busy job and the pay isn’t  _ that  _ great, and Mike can’t hold a job down for very long. I just… don’t know if it’s the best time to be having a baby right now.”

 

But, no matter what was said then, Kara’s pregnant and she’s keeping it. She’d come to Lena before she’d told Mike, and Lena had tentatively suggested the idea of abortion or adoption if Kara didn’t feel she was ready for a child, but the blonde had shook her head and made the decision to raise the life that was growing inside her. She hadn’t even taken offence at Lena’s suggestion, knowing that the Luthor had only her best interests at heart. 

 

But still, she was worried now, worried for the baby, worried for the future, worried for herself, and Lena could see as much. Outwardly, Kara was all smiles and excitement, but when it was just Lena, she could allow her walls to fall and her true emotions to come to the forefront. It broke Lena’s heart to see her friend so conflicted, but still, she didn’t see how Kara would do a bad job of being a mother, and she told her as such. The blonde was worried she wouldn’t love the child, was worried it wouldn’t love  _ her _ , she was worried about bills and food and rent and how they were going to be able to manage if Mike lost his job again.

 

Lena, of course, told Kara she’d help out wherever she could; she’d pay bills if the couple fell behind, buy them a place to live if they wanted, and Kara was grateful, but refused her friend’s offers, saying she wasn’t desperate yet. The only thing Lena said she would adamantly refuse to do was babysit. At least, until the child was old enough to be able to walk and talk and do things by itself, and Kara, who’s known of Lena’s discomfort around infants and toddlers for years, had laughed and promised never to ask that of her.

 

And then, very suddenly it seems, the baby is born.

 

It’s a girl, and Lena’s not there when she comes into the world, and part of her is glad and the other part not; glad she wasn’t there because the last thing she wants to see is her friend in pain and a screaming infant all on the same day, but sad she wasn’t because, apparently, Kara was alone for the whole ordeal.

 

Still, Lena rushes to the hospital as soon as she gets the call from a very tired but happy-sounding Kara. She’s there before Kara’s family, and even there before Mike, and Kara admits that she may have phoned Lena first, and the thought that she’s so important to her friend makes Lena light up inside.

 

She declines Kara’s offer to hold the baby, and Kara smiles and doesn’t ask her to again. They discuss names whilst they wait for Alex to arrive and for Mike to finally answer his damn phone, because Kara refused to pick any out beforehand, instead insisting that it would come to her when she laid eyes on her child.

 

It didn’t, though, so now Lena’s being an idiot and suggesting names like ‘Potato’ and ‘Duvet’, and Kara’s giggling right along with her because she can’t think of anything sensible either. 

 

The baby remains nameless all through the Danvers family visit, but after Alex reluctantly hands her back to Kara and leaves the room, shooting a smile over her shoulder and waving at Lena, a name finally arrives in the blonde’s mind; Astra.

 

It was her aunt’s name, Lena knows, and it fits the child perfectly, but it brings a hint of tears to Kara’s eyes, so Lena tells her she’s still going to call the baby ‘Tealeaf’, as she’d been doing all through the Danvers’ visit, and Kara snorts with laughter and the sadness is broken. Still, they refrain from officially naming the baby until Mike shows up to give his input. It takes a while, but he finally answers his phone when Lena calls, Kara’s mobile having long run out of charge.

 

“What?” he answers impolitely.

 

“Your girlfriend’s in the hospital,” Lena tells him. “Congratulations, you’re a father.”

 

He arrives fairly quickly, though not as fast as Lena had, and she was further away than he was when she got the call, but he’s here now, and the look on his face is so soft that Lena thinks that maybe he’s changed and she hasn’t noticed.

 

Kara tells him that she and Lena like the name Astra, and Mike says it’s perfect, though his eyes jump over to the Luthor when she’s mentioned. Lena sees a spark of something within them, but she isn’t sure what, and she leaves shortly after he arrives, wanting to give the little family space.

 

The next day, she’s back at the hospital, and bringing with her fresh strawberries for a Kara that’s been complaining about hospital food over twitter. Mike is nowhere to be found, and Lena expected better of him, even though she knew she probably shouldn’t have, but Alex is there again, her niece wrapped securely in her arms as she talks with Kara. Lena joins them, and presents her strawberries, which Kara’s face lights up at the sight of, and are gone in five minutes.

 

She stays for a few hours, and then has to get back to work, but she promises she’ll pop back later if Kara’s still there.

 

By the time Lena finally leaves the office, though, Kara’s gone back home, and Lena thinks it’ll be best if she leaves her to settle back in on her own, so she sends her a text wishing her a good night and goes to sleep.

 

She doesn’t see Kara for a few days, and when she does it’s completely unexpected, the blonde turning up at her apartments at eight in the morning, Astra in a pram and a desperate, frazzled look on her face. She starts sobbing the second after she sees Lena, and the Luthor thinks for a moment that the worst must have happened, that Mike must have left them to fend for themselves, but then she ushers Kara inside and gives her a cup of tea and opens the best biscuits and the blonde spills her heart out; she says she’s not getting any sleep and that Mike is no help with Astra and everything feels like it’s falling apart. 

 

Lena knows she has no hope of being able to help in this situation, so she just wraps Kara in her arms and hold her as she cries out days of pent up misery and frustration.

 

Eventually, she calms down and she drinks her tea and then explains things more reasonably. It is here that Lena learns that Mike hasn’t even tried to take any time off work to help look after his daughter, and that when he’s home he doesn’t lift a finger either. He hasn’t once fed Astra, or changed her, or bathed her, and Lena’s never felt a desire to punch the man more. Kara says he never gets up in the night when Astra cries, and that she’s gotten very little sleep because of it, and she hates that he’s being like this because it’s starting to make her think that she might start to hate Astra.

 

Lena wastes no time in calling Alex and Eliza and having them both come over to her apartment. She leaves Kara and Astra in the capable hands of her mother, and then she and Alex take Lena’s car to Mike’s workplace, where they proceed to drag him outside and verbally berate him for the way he’s been acting (Lena) and threaten him with bodily harm unless he steps up and acts like a father (Alex).

 

When they get back to Lena’s, Kara is asleep on the sofa and Eliza is singing a lullaby to Astra. Alex moves Kara to Lena’s room under the Luthor’s insistence that Kara would only get a bad back from sleeping on the furniture, and the three of them try not to disturb her until she wakes up.

 

Astra has different ideas, however, but when Kara wakes to her cries she isn’t as hysterical as before.

 

After the little talk he received from Alex and Lena, Mike actually seems to be trying now; he’ll bottle-feed Astra when it’s his turn without a fuss and has even started helping to change her, but he’s still not father of the year. Still, it’s better than he was, and Kara is much happier, which is why it comes as such a surprise when Lena gets a phonecall at three in the morning, two months later.

 

“Wait,” she says, trying to wade through the fog in her mind to understand her best friend. “He’s what?”

 

“He’s gone,” Kara chokes back. “He just… I don’t know! We were fighting and then he- he threw a chair and then he left. Lena- Lena, I don’t think he’s coming back.”

 

And so of course Lena leaps out of bed and into her car and drives over to Kara’s whilst still in her pyjamas. She doesn’t knock, doesn’t need to, and she finds a sobbing Kara on the living room floor when she steps inside. Astra is crying somewhere in her room, too, but Lena doesn’t know what to do about that, so she goes about putting her friend back together so she can tend to her daughter.

 

It takes some time, but Kara is eventually stable enough to see what’s wrong with Astra, who’s managed to cry herself into silence by that point anyway. After the baby is changed and fed, Kara curls into Lena on the sofa and tells here everything.

 

She tells her how she’d asked Mike to change Astra and how he’d just blown up at her, said that caring for children was a woman’s job and that she was lucky he did as much as he was doing. He’d said that he’d quit his job, and Kara had been understandably upset at that - he was their main earner now, after all, and they needed the money if they were going to be able to both pay their bills and look after a child - but he’d acted as if she was being silly.

 

The argument had escalated, and culminated in Mike throwing a chair in anger, saying he ‘didn’t want to do this anymore’, and leaving.

 

Lena’s blood was boiling, but she stayed calm for Kara’s sake, and she stayed the night with her on the sofa, the blonde not wanting to go to her bed because it reminded her too much of Mike.

 

They woke to Mike coming back, and a ray of hope sparked in Kara’s eyes as she disentangled herself from Lena, but Mike didn’t say a word to either of them, simply grabbing a few of his things and leaving again. This set off another crying fit from Kara, which made Lena call into work sick. For the rest of the day, the two talked about what to do, and Kara said she wanted to try going it alone; if push came to shove, she could just ask Eliza if she could move back home, but, until then, she was going to see if she could manage.

 

Of course, without Mike’s income, and with more expenses than usual in the form of Astra, Kara struggled desperately.

 

She made it a whole two months before she was forced to cave, but she was loathe to ask Eliza to take her in; for starters, the woman was getting on, and she’d done her time of raising children. She deserved a break, and she lives too far away from Kara’s job anyway. Alex was always an option, and she’d offered as much, but Kara knew that moving in with her sister would only cause trouble in Alex’s life, disrupting the time alone that the older woman needed to keep her sane, and keeping her up at night when she already had a very demanding job.

 

Lena, of course, offered to financially support Kara completely, but it wasn’t just money Kara needed; it was emotional support. Close, meaningful, emotional support, so she turned down the offer.

 

And then Lena put forward the idea of Kara moving in with her.

 

The blonde protested at first, citing that she could  _ never  _ impose like that, and that she knew Lena’s feelings on small children and didn’t want to put her through having to live with a child when she never particularly liked them in the first place, but Lena assured her it would be fine. She wasn’t sure if it would be, of course; Kara was quite right, she had no idea how she’d cope with an infant living in her apartment, but Kara was the priority, and by god, Lena would do anything to see her safe and happy.

 

So Kara and Astra moved in with Lena.

 

Luckily, Astra was sleeping through most nights now, and she slept in the bedroom furthest away from Lena’s own, so the Luthor was seldom woken by her cries. The days were a bit odd; she’d wake up, make breakfast, check on Kara, who was doing a lot better now she was sleeping more, and then leave for work. She’d be visited at lunch by Kara and the baby, and they’d go out to lunch like the last time they’d lived together. It was nice.

 

Still, Lena found herself still being a bit awkward around Astra, even after a few months of having the baby in her apartment. Kara never asked her to help with the child, never asked Lena to hold her or feed her or change her, and Lena appreciated that, but she still did some of those things sometimes anyway, without being asked, just to give Kara a bit of a break. She still called her by ridiculous names as well, just to see if she could bring a smile to Kara’s face, which she usually could. She kept defaulting to Tealeaf, though, the name they’d used before they’d called her Astra, and soon the pair of them were using the nickname almost as much as her real one.

 

The weekend before Astra turned 1 year old, Lena’s father died. It was a surprise to everyone, and what was even more of a surprise was that he’d left almost everything to Lena! Lillian was left the house, and a sufficiently large sum of money to keep her comfortable for the rest of her life, but the rest, the holiday houses, the car collection, the business, and the fortune, all went to Lena.

 

For the entire of the day, she swung between devastation and elation; despite how little time she spent with him, and how little he seemed to care, Lena did love her father. But, then again, he’d been a cold man, bordering on cruel, and he’d done nothing to shield her from Lillian’s rage and anger and abuse her entire life.

 

And, now she had the business, she could finally start to do something good for the world, could finally steer the company way from weapons manufacturing and turn it’s labs to working on more ways they could better the medical industry, or advance scientific breakthroughs.

 

She took a few days off from work to sort through her emotions, in which time she treated Kara to a night at a lovely restaurant, began work on reshaping the company, and received a death threat from her mother. Lena had laughed at that last one, but Kara had been horrified, and that was the moment the blonde realised that all Lena’s off-hand remarks about how her mother would probably kill her if she did something were probably true.

 

When they attended the funeral together, Kara wouldn’t let Lillian get anywhere near Lena, and spent the whole time glaring daggers at her. Her hatred for the woman made Lena fell special, oddly enough; she was pleased that Kara cared enough about her to hate someone’s existence, when the blonde couldn’t even bring herself to hate Mike. Still, Lena also tried to keep Kara away from Lillian save her friend kicking the shit out her mother. God knows she hated the woman, too, but she didn’t think it was a great idea to knock her to the floor and boot her in the head.

 

When Lena officially takes over as CEO of the newly re-named L-Corp, she’s interviewed on far too many media platforms and is followed by paparazzi wherever she goes. Well, she wasn’t at first, but then someone managed to snap a picture of her and Kara together with Astra, and suddenly there are idiots with cameras everywhere, and all Lena gets asked about anymore is her ‘girlfriend’ and her ‘daughter’.

 

It could be worse, she supposes - they could be searching for anything negative about her that exists and blowing it out of proportion to compare her to her terrorist of a brother - but she’s still not particularly fond of it. It feels like university all over again, and isn’t helped by the fact that Astra’s taken to calling her ‘mamma’ right along with Kara. They both gently say no whenever the infant calls Lena mamma, but Astra is adamant, and Kara gives up quickly. 

 

Still, at least all this ‘girlfriend and kid’ stuff is good for Lena’s image, and so, good for the company too, no matter how much she denies it, both in person and in print. There must be 100 assorted articles and interviews with the Luthor saying ‘no, Kara and I aren’t dating’ and ‘no, Astra isn’t my daughter’, but the world just thinks they’re trying to hide their relationship.

 

And all of this happened just as Lena had managed to convince herself that she wasn’t in love with Kara anymore. She was, of course, but she’d managed to bury it so far down now that she didn’t think it would ever come up again.

 

She’d been horribly wrong.

 

Her feelings are ripped to the surface by the media’s probing, and they’re stronger than she remembers and dear god how did she ever stop herself from kissing Kara? The desire to do so is ever-present, but it’s a battle she’s practiced at winning, so she surpesses and surpresses and eventually she can ignore it completely.

 

On Kara’s birthday, though, Lena phones Alex to ask if she can babysit for the night, and Alex asks if she can babysit forever, so fond she is of her niece, and Lena surprises Kara with a gorgeous new dress and dinner for two at an amazing restaurant that’s gorgeous and cozy and serves potstickers as both a starter and a side dish. They order a few cocktails each, but don’t let themselves get too drunk, and then they catch a taxi home and watch a trashy movie on Lena’s bed.

 

She’s not sure how they end up kissing, but it happens and it’s wonderful, and Lena pours her everything into it and Kara kisses back just as passionately. It feels like it lasts forever, but at the same time is over too soon. They pull back, and Lena opens her eyes to see Kara staring at her with something unidentifiable in her eyes. She cups Lena’s face for a moment and then kisses her softly.

 

“We can’t,” she breathes when she pulls away, and Lena nods, but she doesn’t necessarily agree. 

 

Still, if that’s what Kara wants, if that’s how Kara  _ feels,  _ then Lena won’t push her, won’t try to push for whatever they just shared to happen again. They fall asleep next to each other, or at least Lena thinks Kara falls asleep. She herself doesn't seem to sleep at all, but then she’s waking up in Kara’s arms and wondering if she dreamed the kiss.

 

Kara certainly doesn’t seem like she’s going to acknowledge it any time soon, so Lena tries going back to normal, too. But how do you got back to normal once you’ve had a taste of heaven?

 

Apparently the answer is ‘you force yourself to’, because there’s nothing else Lena can do; she can’t push Kara and she can’t avoid her, wouldn’t want to anyway. But things don’t quite go back to normal, because now Kara knows  _ exactly  _ how Lena feels about her, and though it doesn’t change anything about their normal day to day lives, there’s something in the air that wasn’t there before. Kara starts to try again to dissuade Astra from calling Lena ‘Mummy’ as she’s taken to now, and she’s very careful about not falling asleep in Lena’s bed.

 

And, for some reason, this hurts much, much worse than her not knowing, because she’s taking such great pains to avoid leading Lena on that it shows the Luthor how much she cares, and that makes Lena’s heart both swell and shatter in the same breath. Other people have picked up on this, too, and it’s Alex that finally sits Lena down with a huge bottle of whiskey and a ‘she finally caught on, huh?’, and the two spend the night drinking heavily and crying about their lives whilst Kara is away visiting Eliza.

 

The next morning (afternoon?), Kara’s back, and Astra finds the state of her Mummy and her Auntie Alex hilarious. Alex stumbles home to sleep some more as soon as she’s able, Astra’s shrill little voice too much for her delicate ears when she’s this hungover, but Lena’s forced to barricade herself in her room and wait out the child’s giggling.

 

Thankfully, Kara takes pity on her, and takes Astra out for the afternoon. By the time they return, Lena’s recovered (mostly), and has dinner on the table.

 

And something seems to just click that night. Lena’s not sure whether or not something changes in their lives, or in Kara, or in her, but whatever happens, things suddenly feel normal again, and better than before at that. Maybe Lena feels lighter because she finally poured her soul out to Alex and, now everything’s out in the open, she doesn’t feel quite so alone? Maybe there’s a spark of something in Kara’s eyes that looks like it will only grow over time and promises love and happiness? Maybe it’s nothing, and Lena’s just adjusted to the new normal they’ve made for themselves at last?

 

Whatever it is, it brightens their lives for the next few months. Kara goes back to work, and Lena hires the best nanny she can find, recommended by none other than Cat Grant, Kara’s boss and media queen, to look after Astra whilst the two of them are busy with work. They fall back into their old routine properly now, and, honestly? Lena doesn’t think she’s ever been happier, especially now that routine has ‘watching trash TV on Lena’s giant flatscreen in her room and falling asleep there, too’ tagged onto the end of it of an evening.

 

Lena’s not too sure how long this new form of bliss goes on for, but she knows that it ends, always knew that it would do.

 

In the days leading up to the shattering of her life, Lena starts to notice the look on Kara’s face, the look that says ‘I’m gearing up to tell you something important’, and Lena doesn’t know what that something important is, but she knows that she can’t wait to hear it, because whatever it is is making Kara happy.

 

But then there’s a knock at her door one day, a month after Astra turns three, and she answers it to find Mike on the other side. She slams the door in his face before he can get a word out, then chastises herself, takes a deep breath and opens it again.

 

“I take it you’d like to speak to Kara?” she asks as politely as she can manage.

 

“Yeah, I-”

 

“One moment.”

 

She cuts him off and closes the door again, then drifts through the penthouse to the living room where Kara is playing with Astra. Kara looks up with a smile on her face, and Lena has to watch it crumble when she says that Mike’s at the door.

 

Kara goes to see him, and Lena asks if she wants backup, but the blonde wants to do this on her own, so Lena won’t push, but she  _ will _ keep an ear out for anything untoward happening.

 

It proves pretty much impossible to eavesdrop when Astra is babbling at her to ‘Mummy, mummy, look at this!’, but Lena tries her hardest, and picks up on when voices start being raised, abandoning Astra on the carpet to go and save her best friend.

 

She rips open the door to Mike yelling ‘I want to see her!’ and Kara yelling back that he doesn’t deserve to. She puts on the face that sends board members running and pitches her voice to it’s most menacing, and tells him to take a hike, and he looks like he wants to spit at her, but thinks better of it and slinks off.

 

Kara looks deflated, and Lena’s heart goes out to her, and then Astra appears in the doorway and asking who the man was, so the two women get busy distracting her so they don’t have to think about Mike anymore, and don’t have to explain to the little girl that her daddy, that neither of them talk about, in neither a positive or negative way, has come back and wants to meet her.

 

Lena thinks it’s for the best that Mike stay out of her life; he’s only going to leave again, and it’d crush Astra to lose someone she’s grown close to, but Lena can see the guilt in Kara’s eyes. Now Mike is back in the area, it’s impossible for the blonde to avoid thinking about him, and every time she does, she feels bad for keeping Astra away from him. And surely it’s cruel to deny her daughter a chance to know her father?

 

The two women talk at length about the subject one night after Mike texts Kara, having gotten her new number off her before they started arguing in the hallway, and Kara decided to meet him somewhere to talk. Lena insists on coming with her and, for once, Kara agrees; she wants Lena there. She closes a hand around the Luthor’s.  _ Needs _ Lena there.

 

~~~~~

 

The meeting with Mike goes surprisingly well; he tells then he’s changed, shows them proof of it, even. He’s got a car, a place in the city, and a steady job. It’s not much, but it’s a start, and it’s definitely better than before. He tells Kara he still loves her and his eyes don’t linger on Lena’s chest even once the whole evening. He apologises for losing his temper when he came to see them the other day, says he just wanted to see Astra so bad, and that he still wants to, but will understand if Kara says no.

 

Kara says she’ll think about it, and Lena still doesn’t trust him, but she’ll go along with whatever Kara decides; Astra’s not  _ her  _ daughter, after all, even if she is beginning to feel like she is.

 

And, as if to prove that, Lena isn’t there when Astra finally meets Mike; she’s busy with a meeting that she needs to come out of on top else her business will lose investors. She comes home to find a smile on Kara’s face and Astra gushing about how her daddy had taken them to the park and out for ice-cream. There’s a small pang of jealousy in her heart then, because Mike gets to be absent for three years then just waltz back in as a hero, and Lena is the one who has to deal with temper tantrums when Astra doesn’t want to eat her vegetables, even though she knows she likes them.

 

But she pushes the feeling down, telling herself to get over it because Astra was never hers to begin with. She didn’t even  _ want  _ children, for crying out loud!

 

So why was she so relieved when Astra still called her mummy?

 

Weeks pass, and Mike sees more and more of Kara and Astra, never with Lena there, and Lena thinks that might be a good thing; sooner or later, he’d pick up on the fact that she still didn’t like him, and it was bound to cause issues. Apparently, though, he really has changed; he’s nicer, softer, and more patient, and he’s making Kara come home smiling so can Lena really complain?

 

Well, she could, but it’s not her place to and she has no right to, not even when Kara comes back one day and, as they’re both drifting off in Lena’s Queen-size bed, tells the Luthor she’s thinking of giving Mike another chance.

 

Lena swears her heart stops, but she forces herself to listen to the rest of what Kara is saying. She listens to every word without uttering a single one of her own until the very end when Kara asks her for her input.

 

Lena wants to say ‘no, don’t go back to him, stay with me instead’, but she doesn’t, and in the end settles for a ‘do what you feel is right’ and hopes against hope that that ‘something right’ is politely turning Mike down.

 

It isn’t, of course.

 

Kara goes on a date with Mike and is swept off her feet. He takes her to a nice restaurant, doesn’t get too drunk, and is so much nicer than he’s ever been before. It’s not long before they set up another date, and another, and another, and another, and suddenly they’re a couple again and Lena is wondering what on earth’s going to happen next that she didn’t see coming.

 

Apparently that thing is Mike moving in with them.

 

He’s been Kara’s boyfriend again for the better part of three months before Lena caves and agrees to see the man properly again. They go to an aquarium so Astra can see the fish, and Lena spends the whole time keeping an eye on Mike. To her great surprise, he seems okay, and is the same the next time they meet. He grows on her, as much as she hates to admit it, so when he asks Kara to move in with him after eight months of dating, and Kara asks Lena for advice once again, worrying about what would happen if he left again and how Astra would take the move away from Lena, Lena simply suggests that he move in with them. Yes, she’ll be losing Kara’s warmth at night once again, but she can handle that, and she can certainly handle not being able to be with Kara whilst Kara is off being in love with other people, so Mike moves in on a rainy Tuesday and Astra is ecstatic.

 

Everything goes smoothly at first; Kara retreats to her own room and her own bed, which she hasn’t slept in in what feels like an age, but that she now shares with Mike, and Lena learns to start cooking for four instead of three on the regular. Astra now has a Mommy and Mummy and a Daddy, and is loving every minute of it, and Mike seems to be settling into their lives quite nicely. 

 

Hell, he and Lena are even getting on for once in their lives, actively choosing to hang out with each other on some occasions, siding with one another when Kara tries to diss their taste in music. Honestly, sometimes, it feels like the three of them are in some sort of strange relationship, but for the fact that Lena doesn’t like Mike that way and Kara almost certainly doesn’t like Lena that way either.

 

He doesn’t seem to mind when Kara can’t sleep with his snoring and starts sharing a bed with Lena again either, which is a relief because Lena thought that’d be the one thing to push him over the edge and back to his old self if anything was going to.

 

But then Lena notices something and, once she sees it, she can’t stop; every time Astra calls her Mum or Mummy, something about Mike seems to become a little… off, for lack of a better word. He goes a little quiet and shoots tiny glares over at Lena, and Lena gets a bad feeling every time he does.

 

When Astra’s six, Mike suggests to Kara that they move out of Lena’s place and get an apartment of their own, but Kara shoots him down straight away; she doesn’t want to leave Lena, and Astra wouldn’t either. After that, he’s a little more unpleasant, but Lena figures it’ll pass, and stays out of his way in the meantime.

 

When his mood persists, Lena mentios it to Kara one night when they’re curled up on the sofa, Astra asleep between them, and Kara agrees that she’s noticed the shift. But then Astra shows herself to actually be awake and listening when she says ‘I know why Dad’s grumpy’.

 

“Oh?” Kara asks. “Why’s that then, Tealeaf?”

 

“It’s because he aksed-”

 

“Asked,” Lena corrects.

 

“Yeah, he asked me if I’d like to live with him or Mum, and I said Mum.” She beamed up at Lena. “You’re my favourite.”

 

And of course that means Lena nearly cries with happiness and Kara actually does, but only once Astra’s been put to bed, and that the little girl gets pancakes for breakfast with syrup, sugar  _ and  _ cream. Lena’s never been told she’s anyone’s favourite; best friend, sure, but not favourite. There’s something special about that, she thinks, that little Astra would choose Lena over her own father any day of the week and feel no guilt whatsoever.

 

Two nights later, when Mike is still being a moody bastard and Kara and Lena have had enough of it, they leave him in the apartment with Astra and take a taxi to an expensive cocktail bar where they get more drunk than they should on concoctions that taste like fruit and bad decisions. The place is small, but amazing, expensive, but worth the price. The music is fast and loud, but not too much so, and she and Kara find themselves dancing with each other after the second drink.

 

They kiss after the fourth, and it’s desperate and hungry and inappropriate for the setting so Lena gathers her willpower and pulls away. 

 

Kara looks dizzy and breathless and hungry, and this time it’s Lena who says ‘we can’t’ and follows it up with ‘you’re with Mike’. 

 

And Kara gets a gleam in her eye that seems to say ‘to hell with Mike’, but it vanishes with a a sigh and a ‘you’re right’, and they sleep apart that night.

 

But something definitely changes after that night, and Lena feels suddenly aware that Kara would chose  _ her  _ over Mike now, too. She has an inkling that she always would have, but now it’s a definite, and Lena wonders just how long it’ll be before she proves it.

 

Over the next few months, they get far too close to kissing again several times. They go to a parent-teacher meeting with Astra’s teacher, and everyone there presumes they’re a couple and neither correct them. It’s only when Mike shows up - almost late - and kisses Kara in the waiting room like he’s trying to prove a point that people cotton onto the fact that they’re not.

 

Lines get somehow blurred and neither is sure they want to stop it, but they both know that they need to, and a few months later Mike is back to normal. He still doesn’t seem to like Lena being called Mum, but he doesn’t have to like it; Astra is more Lena’s daughter than his and always has been, and she’s beginning to realise that. She’s even stopped correcting people when they assume she’s Astra’s mother, because she is really, when you stop and think about it.

 

But this is apparently some of of affront to Mike and, one day, he asks Kara if they could have another child. Kara outright laughs in his face, and Lena grins when she hears of it. Kara says that she’s not putting herself through pregnancy again, and that she’s not going to raise anymore children, thank you very much and that, besides, Lena would never go for it.

 

And she’s quite right; Lena loves Astra, don’t get her wrong, and she has no doubt she’d grow to love any other child Kara has, but she  _ really  _ can’t stand the thought of having to deal with another baby. And Mike takes this thread and runs with it, acting like Lena is the only thing stopping he and Kara from having another child. He won’t shut up about how he feels like he missed out on the early years of having a child and that he wants to experience it. He says he’ll stick around this time, do his part and be there for them, but Lena doesn’t believe him, and Kara doesn’t care; she doesn’t want another child.

 

Mike becomes unkind, beginning to blame all of his problems on Lena and reverting back to being sullen and sulky. His temper shortens, even with Astra, and it reaches a head one night just as Kara is tucking their daughter into bed. He corners Lena in the kitchen and tries to make her relent on her ‘no more kids in my apartment’ stance. She, of course, refuses, but does tell him he’s welcome to another child if he moves out, but he knows Kara would never leave her best friend so he gets angry.

 

He starts to shout, but Lena keeps her voice down, and hisses for him to do so as well. The order serves to fuel his temper, and it’s not long before a chair is hurtling towards Lena and making impact.

 

The pain is sharp and terrible, and Lena is knocked to the floor by the blow. She stands just as Mike throws another chair, and that one hits her too, but then Kara is running into the room and tackling her boyfriend as he reaches for yet more furniture. Mike is unceremoniously thrown bodily out of the door, and Lena is picked up off the floor and cradled by Kara, who’s on the phone to Alex asking if she can come over and watch Astra because she needs to take Lena to the hospital.

 

Lena tries to insist that she’s fine and that she doesn’t need medical attention, but then she catches sight of her face in a mirror and realises that she’s bleeding from the head and okay, maybe she should see a doctor.

 

She’s treated for concussion and her head wound is stitched up and, god, she’s got a televised interview in a few days, hasn’t she? But she’s back home the same night and Alex is jumpy and Astra’s terrified, poor thing, but they both calm down when the two women return to the apartment.

 

Lena and Kara miss work the next day, but Astra is still sent to school where she can be distracted from her mother’s injury and her father’s absence by classes and friends. The two spend all morning in bed, Kara lamenting how stupid she’d been to let Mike back into their lives and worrying over how she say going to explain to Astra that her Dad is never allowed back in their home ever again. In the afternoon, they gather up all of Mike’s clothes and belongings and pack them into bags and throw then out the door.

 

That man is never going to come back into their lives again.

 

Astra is confused when she comes home, wondering why her dad isn’t back yet, and Kara takes the task of explaining why upon herself. The child still doesn’t really understand, but she understands that her dad hurt her mum and that that’s a bad thing, and the pair consider that understanding enough.

 

Mike’s things vanish from the doorway two days later, and no one sees neither hide nor hair of him. He’s just gone, exactly like before, and Lena says good riddance. Kara doesn’t cry at his absence this time; she’d never waste time crying over the man who hurt her best friend of over a decade, and she seems lighter now that he’s gone.

 

~~~~~

 

They take some time acclimatizing to his disappearance, but they’re back to the way they were before within a few months. Astra misses Mike deeply, but Kara and Lena definitely don’t, and they're both happier with him gone. Lena had forgotten how good it feels to have Astra call her mum without Mike glaring at her from the background, and Kara can’t believe how nice it is not having to kiss the man anymore.

 

In fact, everything seems better without Mike; there’s no complaint when the sports channel isn’t the only thing on the TV, no moaning when Lena makes a curry for dinner, noone snipping at Astra when she gets a little too excited. Lena feels freer without Mike in her home, and, when she’s a little bit wine drunk one evening after a successful launch of a new product from her company, she asks Kara why she ever suggested he move in with them, and Kara says she really doesn’t know because it was a terrible idea.

 

The only thing that isn’t so great about Mike being gone is that some part of Astra’s happiness left with him; the child is too young to understand everything, too young to know that Lena could have been very seriously injured, and might have been again in the future, if her father hadn’t been thrown out. After all, Tyler in school hurt Astra once, accidentally, and he was made to say sorry and now they’re friends. Why couldn’t her dad just say sorry to her mum and they could all go back to being one big family?

 

Kara and Lena are at a loss of what to say to their daughter, so they settle for not saying much, simply repeating what they’ve already told her in the hopes that the child will somehow be able to see what they’re not saying, to comprehend the seriousness of the issue.

 

But she doesn’t.

 

And of _course_ she doesn’t; she’s only a child for goodness sake. But eventually she stops asking, stops scanning the parking garage for Mike’s car whenever they’re there, stops voicing her hopes that he’ll come home one day. The sadness doesn’t leave her eyes though; it lingers as a shadow, as something inside her weighing her down.

 

It breaks both her mothers’ hearts to see her so, but there’s nothing can be done now, and there’s certainly no way Kara’s going to let that man anywhere near her family ever again, and no way Alex will either, after she found out exactly what he’d done this time. All of them know that, if Mike is capable of losing his temper like that, there’s a real chance that he’s a danger to Astra, too, and no one wants to have to drive that little girl to hospital because her father’s thrown a chair at her, no one wants her to have a scar like Lena’s that looks raw and painful and refuses to fade.

 

And it really does look awful; it’s long, longer than one would expect, and pink, and runs along the length of her hairline, a little below it. Covering it with makeup doesn’t hide it properly and Lena hates it, hates how it looks, how she got it, and who gave it to her. She hates how people’s eyes jump to it whenever they talk to her, hates how everyone in the media won’t stop pestering her about it, hates how she was forced to admit, on live television, that her best-friend’s boyfriend threw a chair at her and now she’s scarred for life.

 

Still, she says to anyone who asks, better her than Kara, and definitely better her than Astra, and at least he didn’t do any  _ serious  _ damage.

 

But really, she tells herself when she’s alone, she should have seen it coming, should have remembered Kara saying he’d done something similar on the night he first left her. She should have noticed that his mood had shifted, should have noticed how aggressive he’d become during the argument and reacted accordingly.

 

She spills all of this to Kara one night, and she’s not even drunk when she does it; just tired and sad because Astra misses her father and has somehow come to the conclusion that it’s Lena’s fault and, good  _ god  _ this is such a mess, isn’t it?

 

But Kara forces the Luthor to look at her, cups her face in her hands, wipes the tears from her eyes, and tells her that none of this is her fault, tells her that if anyone’s to blame then it’s her, it’s Kara. She was the one who let him back into their lives, she was the one who started dating him again, she was the one who-

 

And it turns out they’ve both been blaming themselves for the same thing and the night ends with them crying and laughing in Lena’s too-big-for-one-person bed and agreeing that the only person to blame here is Mike, and good riddance to the bastard.

 

And then it’s decided that Astra needs to stop blaming Lena, too, because she’s seven now, and insists she’s nearly all grown up, so the pair sit her down and tell her the truth. They tell her everything, despite not wanting to become  _ those  _ parents, the ones who badmouth the other parent to the child behind their back, the ones who try to turn their own children against them, but it needs to be done, so they do it.

 

Astra doesn’t talk to either of them for three whole days.

 

But on the fourth she crawls into bed with them and says she’s sorry and touches Lena’s scar and says that her daddy was a bad man and that, if he hurt her mum on purpose, then she didn’t want him to come back again.

 

Kara smiles a watery smile and strokes her hair and says ‘okay, baby’ and then Astra gets waffles for breakfast and Lena tells Kara off for giving their daughter a reward for bad mouthing someone and not talking to them for three days, but the other pair just laugh and giggle and tell the Luthor that there’s cinnamon in the waffles and then of course Lena smiles and breakfast has never been so delicious.

 

~~~~~

 

Mike’s been gone for a year and Astra is eight years old when Kara starts acting odd around Lena. 

 

At first, Lena attributes it to the other girl’s job; she’s recently been promoted to a reporter and her new boss is a bit of a nightmare and the work different and challenging, but then the blonde stops sharing her bed again Lena realises that something must be really wrong.

 

She refuses to talk about it when asked, stating that she’s fine and nothing’s wrong, but she can’t fool Lena and both of them know it, so the Luthor does something she probably shouldn’t and takes Kara out for cocktails again. They’re in the same place they were when they kissed on the dancefloor but had to stop because of Kara’s involvement with Mike, and Lena starts them off with mocktails because the idea of plying Kara with alcohol for information feels disgusting the moment they step out of the taxi they took to get there.

 

It’s Kara that escalates to alcohol, Kara that guides the conversation for the rest of the night, Kara that admits that her feelings for Lena may have run deeper than expected and that she doesn’t know how to handle that. She says she loves Lena, that she thinks she has done for a long time, thinks it was from before Mike turned up and lasted all the way though her second relationship with him. 

 

She says she’s sorry, and Lena wonders why for all of two seconds before she finds out; Kara thinks she doesn’t love her back, thinks that she did once, but that that love must have faded by now, right? That, if it was still present, Lena would have made her move by now, right? After all, Mike’s been gone for a year and nothing’s changed; they’re still not together but they still sleep in the same bed, and it’s been driving Kara slowly crazy, being so close to Lena but unable, she thinks, to have her in the way she wants.

 

And Lena laughs in her face and feels terrible about it a moment later because Kara’s still so oblivious and it’s both hilarious and painful.

 

And then it all comes pouring out; how Lena’s been in love with her since second year of university, how seeing her with Mike was something akin to torture of the highest level, how she’d spent years agonising over the exact same thing Kara was right now, how she hadn’t wanted to push the blonde into a relationship after her last one ended so catastrophically.

 

And then they’re kissing in the back of the cocktail bar, not caring who sees them or what they look like, because they finally can, can finally be with each other as they’ve wanted to be for so long.

 

The don’t even care the next morning when Lena gets a panicked phonecall from her secretary saying that a picture of her kissing Kara is on the front page of  _ everything _ and that it’s all anyone in the office is talking about. They laugh about it and tell Jess not to worry, that everything's fine and that they’ll handle it, and they’ve just gotten the girl to calm down when Lena says ‘oh, and I’m not going to come in today’ and sends her into panic mode once again.

 

Kara calls in from work too, and her boss thinks that’s a brilliant idea and that she should lay low until all of this is explained away and blown over, but then he asks to interview them in the same breath so Lena yanks the phone out of Kara’s hand and hangs up on him.

 

Astra is sent off to school despite the whirlwind of rumours that currently surround her parents, but she’s completely oblivious to them and had somehow known, in the way that children sometimes do, that her mothers have loved each other for a very long time, so the news really doesn’t surprise her at all.

 

In fact, Astra is one of the many who say ‘well, it’s about time’, or variations of, when they hear of the couple finally getting together; Eliza is ecstatic, adoring how she’s finally able to officially welcome Lena into the family, Alex high-fives the Luthor with a smile that says ‘I couldn’t think of anyone better for her’, and even Lena’s mother phones to say how disappointed in them she is which, quite honestly, somehow manages to make Lena’s day.

 

The media has a field day too, having expected a scandalous story of two women being a little too drunk in the back of a bar and making a terrible decision that they’d now have to explain away and brush under the rug, but instead being gifted with an announcement that Lena and Kara are, officially, an item. The pair are asked for interviews by everyone, from major newspapers and gossip magazines to freelance bloggers hoping t make it big, but they only talk to once media source; Cat Grant, queen of all media and most respected woman on the planet, flies herself back to her beloved company to talk to the two lovebirds and get the full scoop.

 

She isn’t given it, of course, Kara wanting to keep their lovely new relationship (that really isn’t all that new at all when you think about it) to themselves for the time being, but Cat takes what she can and then some, and leaves with a smile on her face and a promise to do their story justice.

 

And then it’s peace and quiet and  _ happiness _ , and Lena isn’t quite sure she’s tully had any of that to this degree in her life before and it’s amazing.

 

They debate tracking down Mike and forcing him to give up guardianship of his daughter so that Lena can legally adopt her, but decide against it because he’s out of their lives now and that would be unnecessarily cruel, despite all he’s done. Well, that and the fact that neither of them ever want to see his face again.

 

They don’t get married, although many think that they should because they’re such a perfect couple and the ceremony would be lovely, but Lena’s never been one for tradition and Kara doesn’t feel like marriage is necessary so they stay as they are, happy and in love and living in Lena’s penthouse apartment. Kara officially moves out of her own room and into Lena’s, leaving the now-spare bedroom to be left as a guest-room for anyone who stays over (usually Alex when she’s had too much to drink with Lena).

 

Their lives don’t change all that dramatically, although that isn’t much of a surprise; they’ve known each other for years and have been living together for almost as long. They’ve raised a child together, been by each other's’ side through all the ups and downs life’s thrown at them, and done it all with a smile on their faces. The only difference they can see is that their days are peppered with kisses now, and that things are finally allowed to turn more heated when they share a bed.

 

Astra grows up safe and happy, the happiest she’s ever been now that her mothers are happy with each other. She still misses her father a great deal, remembering only the good times and hating that they had to end, but she understands now that it was his fault that they did, understands that he wasn’t fair to her mom and understands exactly what him hurting her mum means now, and she has no desire to see him again.

 

Lena and Kara don’t know whether to be proud of their daughter or not for that, but they soon find that they don’t care because they’re a proper family at last and it’s wonderful; Lena gets to say she’s Astra’s mother and gets to call Eliza ‘mom’, gets to fall asleep in Kara’s arms with the knowledge that they belong to each other, now and forever, and gets to wake up to a smile and a kiss.

 

It’s everything she’s ever wanted, though not in the way she thought she’d get it, but then, it’s funny how things just work out sometimes, isn’t it?

**Author's Note:**

> Yah so I was in the weirdest of weird moods when I sat down to write this a month ago and it didn't go anything like I planned at all but I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. Did 11,000 words in one go, abandoned it for a month, then wrote the remainder today and vaguely proofread as I did. If you see any spelling or grammar errors just give me a should and I'll fix 'em.
> 
> Uuuuh, that's all from me for now, I'm working on the next chapter of WMtBiCL so you shouldn't have to wait too long for that for once.
> 
> As always, comments are appreciated and feedback is welcome, I hope you all have a lovely day,
> 
> Three :)


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